if you'd rather not read it blind, ive put the requirements we had at the end.(characters are my OCs based off of my fucking pokemon. venus, the narrator, is an adamant female volcarona. houdini, the other character, is a sassy male drifblim. theyve been raised together since hatched and make quite a team unless fighting rock types. theyre written as humans so. yeah. dont picture a moth and weather balloon.) it had to be first POV present tense. the class generated a setting together and we had to write a story around that. originally written sometime between october and november of 2013 for creative writing

When I woke up it was cold, a relief from yesterday’s Venusian heat. The realization of how cold it actually was hit me with the wind. I crawled inside my sloth pelt, rolled out of my ferns, and let my eyes graze the land.

Cypress cages bowed on their knees and allowed easy access to the canopy. All of them bowed for their queen. All of them bowed for me. Perched on a slim branch was my friend swaddled in his pelt, the one that made him look like a fat scavenger flier.

He called me up to his neighbor branch. Split bark flaked off into ribbons under the shift of his weight. I took his offered hand. It was a wonderful view in the canopy. Trees waded in water and knelt in moss. The only place with dry, open dirt in the woods was a sweeping circle half a mile wide. Barren and empty with no trees or rocks, the only thing was a scorched dome in the middle. It was twice my height and wider than anything else. It was hard and cold and grey in the places where soot rubbed off. It became our storage for spare pelts we accumulated. We were always about five minutes away from it so we had easy access.

As soon as my legs swung over the branch his cheeks pushed into his eyes and his smile widened. I knew that look.

He asked if I was up for a race.

My overripe grin split to show my teeth. Of course I was. I hopped into a crouch on the cypress limb. My toes gripped the seams in the bark.

We counted off together and ended in a spring to more branches. Wood cracked and snapped. Limbs bent, shuffled, and drowned out my heavy breaths. A peccary band squealed under me. Poor piggies. They would never reach any higher than my knee. My knee when I was standing on the jungle floor, not traveling treetops.

Then, I realized we had never discussed the finish line. I cut my speed and relied on my arms more since I was two swings away from our usual spot. He slowed down, too and lazily leaped limb to limb off my left. But neither of us stopped. We should have.

He actually did stop, but not by the usual flying leap and roll in the moss. A branch swiped his foot and connected with his shin. A loud ‘THOCK’ echoed. He vaulted over the limb.

I expected a knee to skewer his bushy hair. Instead one dug and peeled his left upper arm like a banana. His coat snagged on branch, tugged, snapped, and floated after him. He grunted and flopped to the ground and was blanketed shortly by his torn pelt. Moss smothered his face.

My mouth dropped open. I pounced to the ground and let myself roll and fold. I only bruised my knees as I yanked the coat off him.

Red dribbled around his arm like a river in the rain. It leeched into the moss. I saw scraps of bark in his pincushion wound. He was warm, his skin still its regular ruddiness. I gingerly turned his head to face the wound and I.

His eyes were clamped shut so hard his brows brushed his cheeks. He was probably chanting expletives over and over. I only heard frantic inhalations.

His mantra extended to include pleading me to help him. He begged me to please help him, it hurts so much, don't just stand there gaping, help him, help him somehow.

Taking quick action I wound his coat around his arm until the blood stopped soaking through. Then I draped my own coat over his vibrating form. I could deal with the cold.

For the record, I never panicked. He was inebriated with pain. I was calm and controlled. The gasp I let out was at the realization of what I had to do, not because he was dying. I sprinted across the moss until my feet dusted dirt. Then, I ran even faster until I reached the monument.

The structure was burning cold that day. My fingers stung by the time I pried it open. Even though I left the panel open I couldn’t see anything inside. Blindly groping in front of me, the floor nipped my feet. I let out a sucking hiss.

My fingers hardly cooperated with me as I wound a bristly, scratchy pelt around me. It was the first and worst one I grabbed. At least it kept me warm. I grabbed two more pelts, loose, worn; stiff, thick. They felt like they were both from the same animal despite their different textures.

With my prizes in hand, I hurried back to him. His tourniquet could not hold long, but I hoped it would. My feet touched moss when I heard a gargling ‘ROWL’ and the flitter of leaves and feathers. It was not the time for one of those. It never was.

The cheetah lunged at me from behind and gave me new scrapes to go with my bruises. Wet knives pierced my hide, dribbling blood and saliva everywhere. It jerked at my pelt and scraped my skin more. My grip only tightened.

When it pulled a patch of fur off, I did not give up. As long as I could get two pelts to him, he would be fine. The infernal creature had the peccary cloth soaked by then. With a deep breath I released my grip. Satisfied, the beast slinked away into a direction I did not care about.

The pelts were damp from the moss but clean. I was not worried it was too late. Primitives might have died falling from a tree. We were not primitives.

Curled on his uninjured side, I mistook him for a small sloth and would have disregarded him as such if his red face was not peeking out.

Kneeling next to him I rubbed his back. I asked if he was sleepy.

He did not even shoot me a look and answered there was no way he could possibly sleep like this.

He was alert. That was good. Ignoring his protests, I began prying off his makeshift bandage.

I would just make it bleed again, he objected.

He was not wrong. A new stream of blood rolled down his arm. The bandage had to stay on his arm longer. He made a short, small inhale when I sat him up. He did not complain when I tied the stiff and thick pelt around his neck and waist. I took the loose and worn pelt and pulled it around him without fastening it.

I shifted in front of him and pulled his legs to my hips. He did not need to be told to hold. A thick arm wrapped around my neck, his other hanging to the side. His cheek fell on my shoulder.

After he was settled I stood up and wobbled a bit trying to balance the weight on my back. I gently, slowly, gingerly made the first of many steps back home.

here is how venus and houdini look. i drew that a while ago but thats basically its. venus is taller than houdini. both are fat, but houdini is fatter. idk if venus and houdinis hair is naturally that color or what tbhit was gonna be about using coats as a symbol for personas but I was writing and I hurt houdini and. I dont know what happened. setting was Pangaea 10k years ago (no one in class listened to my protests) in the swampy woods. in the middle of the woods was a clearing a mile in diameter with a large metal monument in the center. the temperature varied around thirty degrees each day.